AMD to distribute drivers over Steam, Catalyst 10.9 released

Updating your Radeon drivers just got easier. AMD has partnered up with Valve to deliver Catalyst graphics drivers over Steam. ATI GPU updates can now be detected and installed directly from within Steam -- a convenience that will affect plenty of users. Valve reports that a whopping 87% of gamers with DirectX 11 cards on Steam are using an ATI product.

Not coincidentally, a new driver has been released today. Catalyst 10.9 offers performance improvements for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for certain 4000 and 5000-series cards. There are also new or updated Catalyst profiles for Aliens vs. Predator, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, F1 2010, and Kane & Lynch 2.

There are nearly a dozen highlighted bug fixes in the release notes (PDF), spanning Windows XP through Windows 7, and Catalyst 10.9 brings official support for hardware acceleration in the Internet Explorer 9 beta (which is now available). Look under the "Steam" menu in the top left of the Steam client for an option to update your video drivers, or just download them below: